September 12, 2013

In fashion and design, minimalism’s disciplined purity and utilitarian ethos are its own kind of religion.

Slide Show | In the Air: Minimalism In fashion and design, minimalism’s disciplined purity and utilitarian ethos are its own kind of religion.

Courtesy of the Chinati Foundation

In this age of excess, with its emphasis on status and consumerism, there remains a school of the simple. A group of designers are seeking inspiration from the spare, pondering the infinite in plain space, spurring the mind to soar heavenward untrammeled by the weight of embellishment.

Artists have long chosen industrial buildings or monkish cells, undecked and utilitarian, as places both to live and work. Constantin Brancusi constructed his abstract sculptures in the cité d’artistes in Montparnasse, a mews of poorly built Paris studios where he also made his home until just before his death in 1957. In 1971 Donald Judd visited Marfa, the empty desert town in West Texas where he later bought 15 buildings and converted them into studios and exhibition spaces to house permanent installations of his work.

For the fall men’s wear collections, a number of designers, including Ann Demeulemeester and Dior Homme’s Kris Van Assche, took guidance from religious garb in monochromatic tones that seem to evoke the northern light of Flanders, the body appearing androgynous and unsexed, as a relinquishment rather than a celebration of the self. The French architect Jean Prouvé’s 1930 manifesto expressed the need for “logic, balance and purity.” Today’s followers of that idea create work suggestive of a contemplative and disciplined life, which gives great importance to the bones of the design and allows the beauty of the materials to resound.